Double Argent
by Alliriyan
Summary: All the searching, the spying, the scheming, the smiles. All the learning, the loving, the leaving, the lies. They all came down to this. "Matsumotoooo...!" seethed Hitsugaya Toushiro, door snapping off its hinges in his fist. The air filled with electric rage and ice. "WHY are you harbouring a traitor in your sake cupboard? !"


**Double Argent**

_**Anomalies**_

The slender branch supporting his back creaked in the warm wind, swaying minutely from side to side in a rustle of leaves and the faint scent of nearly-ripe persimmons. Arms cradling his head, he peered through the sparse canopy at the late evening light. The round moon shone in a dusty blue sky, and a tiny planet barely visible beside it, a freckle on the face of the yawning twilight.

The boy dozed, never more than half asleep, as the breeze mussed his thin black hair and the sun bid good riddance to yet another empty day. The crunch of sandals across dead leaves barely caused his eyelids to flicker.

"Hark, a vagrant," called a pleasant voice. "This orchard belongs to the Gotei Thirteen, you are aware?"

"S'outside the districts," replied the skinny trespasser, not looking down, not moving an inch.

"Shinigami jurisdiction does sadly extend beyond the districts. A clever boy already knows that though, doesn't he?"

"Does he now," said that soft drawl with a hint of smirk. "I ain't never met one."

"A clever boy who understood the best way to escape the districts was to just walk away from them."

"An' yet…it didn't work." The child was to all intents and purposes half asleep and slow-witted, but his lazy retorts were deceptively sharp. A persimmon lost its grip on its stem, and his left hand scooped the plummeting fruit out of mid-air almost as an afterthought, the action hidden from his visitor's sight. He turned his face away with a tired sigh, quietly enjoying the squashy sweetness as the man talked obliviously below.

"Admittedly you were at a disadvantage, since I was searching for you. I've come to offer you respite. Food, lodgings, clothes, tuition. You've got some potential there, I felt it all the way from my office. A little fiddly to pinpoint you though. So come down from there and look forward to a better life! You're a candidate for the academy." The tall scholarly stranger spread his arms wide with a laugh. "One day all this will be yours, thief."

The black-haired urchin's mind spun with calculations. No one entered Soul Society with a welcome pamphlet, so he had to guess the requirements and consequences of being a 'candidate' on the fly. Food was the first mentioned, so candidates must mostly be the hungry ones, vulnerable to bribes. Bribes implied manipulation, like he wouldn't want to follow the unknown man without incentive; and tuition, the rarest and most expensive of all the four was mentioned last. In passing. Not really of interest to the newcomer who, some sixth sense whispered, must be one of those elusive and arrogant shinigami from the city's innermost ring. So was this one of the underground black markets that liked to prey on Rukongai's countless feral children, or a genuine offer to sell out to the upper castes of the dead and become their Hollow fodder?

"I can't get down," panted the orphan weakly, with a surreptitious flick at the orange bit of pulp on his cheek. "M dyin' of starvation."

"You're surrounded by food," countered the reaper, amused.

"Help yerself…" muttered his candidate, the invitation laced with faint scorn.

As he was bid, the man bit into a firm persimmon plucked from a lower branch and immediately spat the bitter mouthful back out. And the trespasser's mischievous eyes were finally pinned on him, zircon blue like a cat. A knowing smile hovered on the grubby face, his right arm slid off the branch, lifeless. "Too weak ta climb down," the taunt recurring. "An' the food ain't ripe yet."

The shinigami's lips twisted together, mainly the fruit's fault, and he raised his eyebrows over his square framed glasses. "Drop, then, and I'll catch you."

The spindly boy rolled off the branch and thudded into waiting arms, the man spinning him round into a fireman's lift as if he weighed no more than a feather. Head and arms dangling behind the stranger's back, the child dipped a hand into the black shihakusho pocket whilst his friendly kidnapper was distracted, and was rewarded with a gleaming black marble.

Well he couldn't do much with that, unless it would sell. It was heavier than glass, perhaps a precious stone, in which case he'd be set for life. He flicked it from palm to palm, watched the newly unveiled stars glitter on its oil-smooth surface.

"What've you got back there?" asked the reaper cheerfully, setting off back the way he had come, to the districts and then Seireitei, perhaps.

"Persimmon," lied the stray easily, pressing the cold sphere against his tongue to see if it tasted of stone or glass or crystal.

"I don't envy you," the other replied, still spitting sour aftertaste out of his mouth. "What do your friends call you?"

"Who?"

"Your frie-… Your name."

"Ichimaru."

"Is that your given or family name?"

"…Uhh… don' remember…"

"Never mind." The smile was audible, even if Ichimaru couldn't see it. "My name is Aizen Sousuke. It was nice to meet you, Ichimaru."

They walked a long way, never reaching the shanty town edges of Rukongai, and the ground flickered swiftly beneath the shinigami's sandalled feet, faster than the boy's eyes could follow. Within four minutes they were in a place he'd never seen before, tangled woods and untamed meadows and not a glimmer of man-made light in any direction. Sousuke set him down with a pat on his straight black hair.

The death god's hair was wavy brown, his glasses simple, his uniform standard issue with no embellishments. He looked utterly, disarmingly harmless. Since it wasn't a time of special alert, he didn't even carry a sword by his hip.

It was getting pitch dark, the last light almost gone. Ichimaru didn't mention that they seemed to have gone the wrong way, nor that he'd never been told what happened to candidates, nor how suspicious the surroundings were. Sousuke doubtless knew already.

Aizen smiled again. "You're keen. They don't usually pluck the Hougyoku from my pocket before I present them to it."

He tracked the man's gaze to the black ball half-hidden in his hand. He couldn't afford pockets to tuck it in – there were none in his yukata, and it was the same dull thing he'd been wearing ever since he woke up on the dusty streets of Sixty-Eighth, clutching his leg that should have been pouring blood and wasn't, the sepia memories fading quickly from his mind; of kids' gangs play-fighting that had suddenly gone too far.

He'd had been planning to wriggle free and get lost in a crowd once they reached the districts, and pawn it to the first, no the second taker, once he had an idea of value. Or he could just ask.

Ichimaru tossed it into the air and caught it in his other hand, behind his back like a juggler. "Is it worth much?"

Movements invisible, so fast were they, Aizen was suddenly behind him and reaching down to retrieve his onyx jewel. Snatching it away, the blue-eyed vagrant glared over his shoulder at the tall man looming at his back.

"Currently, it's worth everything and nothing. I'm more concerned over its potential. A pity about _yours_," Sousuke clamped his fist round the brat's wrist, it took a touch of flash movement to accomplish. "You really would have excelled at the Academy."

Aizen's free hand closed around Ichimaru's, the black orb clenched within, and he released power into it, all his power at once and more, the low-seated officer briefly matching lieutenants, half a dozen lieutenants, and then equalling a captain, and straining with all his soul, elevating far beyond, double the output of any bankai, and it was possible so long as it was only a split second, no matter how it burned his veins. It was simple science, like lightning discharging tremendous power for a microsecond, doable but unsustainable.

And Ichimaru kicked and struggled, his bare feet gouging furrows through the soft earth as he leaned as far away as he could – almost vertical, not screaming he saved his breath for fighting to escape, the air was thick, poisonous syrup, and he could not wrench himself free.

Thousands of tiny black hands squirming out of the Hougyoku and wriggling under his skin, devouring him, turning him inside out...he felt the ribbons wrap round his bones, dig into his marrow; cutting into the wick of his soul. It was impossible. The boy shrieked, opening his icy blue eyes wide in horror, but the stranger, the forest, the sky was nowhere to be seen.

There was only cloying tarry darkness, tumbling into a bottomless pit the minuscule hands had carved into his soul. Soundless words, wordless speech echoed across the black, endless free fall.

_Don't– _shouted Ichimaru where no one existed to hear.

Sousuke observed with scientific fascination as the feral boy whined and sank to the ground, screwing eyes shut, clenching teeth against the white clay crawling up his throat. An unexpected flare of strength ripped his wrist from Aizen's vice. The test subject curled into a ball, pressing the Hougyoku against his chest within which his heart was surely dissolving.

But Ichimaru held his breath, no scream emerging.

In minutes the Hougyoku reclaimed its army of dark, boneless arms and became inert. The child didn't move except to twitch from time to time. Were Sousuke not an expert on such matters, he'd have assumed the thing was dead. More dead; technically speaking.

In the privacy of his foetal position, Ichimaru was frantically trying to concoct a way out of this mess. What had that bastard shinigami done? Was that normal in Seireitei? If he went to the Academy, would it happen again? And if not, how many had given their permission for this madman – he could at least tell it wasn't a captain – to go out and torture lowlifes in the slums? His lungs pumped raggedly, did he feel different; was that his heartbeat pounding in his ears or some replacement? But most of all, what scared him was the question of who was most dangerous – the vicious soul eating marble, or the smiling, bookish man playing games with it?

By the time Sousuke had kicked him in the ribs and rolled him over with a displeased foot, the street rat had his answer.

The orb couldn't hurt him without a person to hold it, but the man couldn't turn people inside out without its help. Probably. So the marble was more powerful, but being inanimate (for all its almost-whispers and multitude of opposable thumbs), that left the reaper aptly more deadly. It was his gentle benefactor he had to coax into finding a worthless orphan more interesting alive than dead.

Prising the Hougyoku from the test subject's stiff fingers, Aizen saw the eyes open and the mouth force itself into a panicked smile.

"An anomalous result," chided the evil genius, dripping distaste. "You're the first complete dud I've had, even among all the other undesired outcomes."

It took a while for the dud to rally his witty comebacks. "…haa…aah…" gasped the boy; "…did they do that t' you too…after tellin' you yer a candidate…?"

"Not smart after all," dismissed the shinigami; "does my hair look white to you?"

"Why'd it be…" scoffed the black-haired one, before the smirk fell off his face and his hands shot to his head. The moonlight wasn't strong enough here to tell if anything had changed, and it was starlight making his tanned arms so pale, wasn't it? The memory of ghostly paws stroking his bone marrow made visual concerns take a back seat.

"How did you avoid Encroachment?" asked Aizen, perturbed, shining a small pen torch into the formerly blue eyes; blinding them. The change to iris and sclera was strange. "You should have a mask and a hollow. No heart. At least some bodily deformation."

Broken as the laughter was, it hinted at a fierce resilience none of his former experiments had shown. "Oh, it's interestin', what you did, but I dint see it was all that heart-breakin'…"

"No sudden cravings?" suggested the man listlessly. Reaching into his robes for a lethal dart, he stood and began to walk away. "No wondering what human flesh tastes like?"

"Before ya abducted me," the failure called after him insolently; "I was wonderin' if the stars here and the stars in the living world were the same?"

"No, the constellations are vastly different, though they may be giving the same stars different names and patterns if you wish to argue the point. By the way, you shouldn't recall your earlier interests either," sighed Sousuke, and flicked the poison dart behind him with the force of a bullet, heard the waste of his time choke on its last breath, and flash-stepped back to civilisation.

···~···

Ichimaru woke upside down in a tree, shortly before he fell out of it. Dewy grass soaked his thin clothes and he cursed imaginatively whilst trying to turn the world the right way up again. The night before he'd curled up to sleep, unable to face events and content to let oblivion shoulder the pressure for a while. He hadn't picked a good tree. In the cold light of dawn and a chilly impromptu bath, things didn't look much prettier. All he'd achieved was adding a bruise on his head to the one on his chest.

Now _that_ felt like a horse had kicked him straight through to the spine. A big horse. When he'd stopped coughing enough to find the missile that hit him, its needle was buried deep in his ribs, and he couldn't feel the prick.

It was pinned to his grimy yukata, which ripped when he tried to get it out, and a strange black shard came with it. Porcelain smooth, but less brittle. He couldn't remember stealing a plate, but maybe he'd meant to beg with it in glossier districts. The tip of the poison dart was embedded in it, saving his life. But only by a hair's-breadth, since the punch with which the little present was delivered had almost caved his chest in regardless.

That had been midnight. Now the sun was weakly sifting through the morning mist, and new hunger was nibbling at his insides.

"Benefits o' livin' in Seireitei…" murmured Ichimaru, trying to breathe lightly; "every damn thing. Benefits o' livin' in a gutter…Aizen ain't here."

He reconsidered.

"As much."


End file.
